Saturday, March 31, 2012

Movies and novels are fictionalized accounts of how the real
world operates and most people accept this. You won’t find too many people
trying to take the plot of a movie or some book and making a lifestyle change
so as to fit that particular model for success. We pay for a ticket, we zone
out for a couple of hours then we return to reality and our normal lives, such
as they are, and we realize as much fun as it sounds, no one is going to fly
through the air on a bike with an alien in the front.

Yet there he was. Calvin was one of the regulars at bars in
Valdosta, and he wasn’t a bad person, just someone who was habitually
depressing. He was a kill joy, a buzz
kill, and there was no happy event Calvin couldn’t throw a cold wet blanket
over. That was bad enough in and of itself but Calvin liked guns. Calvin, who
was in his med- twenties, wanted to be a gun smuggler when he grew up. You can
see where a man who is doom and gloom all the damn time, and who likes guns,
might not be someone who has a lot of friends, don’t you?

The first rule of business is advertising. Let’s say you’re
selling donkeys. I don’t know anyone who does sell donkeys, or why someone
would wake up one day and decide to sell donkeys, or really, why anyone would
buy a donkey, but if you were selling donkeys you’d tell people that was what
you did for a living and I would suppose, unless you just didn’t think it was
something you would want to talk about at parties, that you would talk about
selling donkeys at parties. But to talk about selling Ak-47’s and other weapons to drug dealers in Mexico
and how much money there is in that business is more than a little odd. Yeah,
if you were a woman looking for some action at a party you might choose a gun
runner over a used donkey salesman, but then again maybe not. Maybe someone who
could talk to a nun for two minutes and have that woman ready to open her wrist
in a bathtub full of rubbing alcohol while smoking meth rather than listen for
another two minutes wouldn’t be someone you’d buy a gun, or a donkey from, or
for that matter, go home with after a party.

This made Calvin worse.

Had it not been for a woman named Heather maybe Calvin would
have faded into obscurity and my past, never to be heard from again. Heather
was a vivacious and well meaning woman, who was also built well enough to drawn
the attention of most men, and even chronically depressed men, like Calvin. One
night at a local bar Calvin was telling Heather of his plan to build up a
reputation with the local gun dealers, slowly edge his way into the illegal
guns trade and then make a fortune selling guns in Mexico. But at that very moment, some old song came
over the speakers, “Secret Agent Man” and Heather began singing it to Calvin.
Instantly, three or four more other people caught on, and suddenly a dozen
people who had no idea what was going on, starting singing the song simply
because the cute chick was singing.

That pushed Calvin over the edge

In his mind, Calvin suddenly saw himself as some walking
joke. This was true to some extent, but
no one should take his own dreams too seriously, or too lightly. But it was his
dream and by Dog, he would show us he could sell guns to the Mexicans with the
very best of them. Calvin went on a full scale blitz to find someone, anyone,
anyone at all, with the right connections, and he scoured the bars in Valdosta
looking for someone who might know someone who was selling large caliber
automatic weapons to drug dealers in another country.

You see this coming, don’t you? What do you think would
happen to someone who was advertising their services as a gun smuggler to every
drunk who could or would talk guns? Sooner or later, that sort of talk is going
to attract the attention of law enforcement.
An undercover cop offered to sell some illegal guns to Calvin and he
drained his bank account to buy the guns. He never made it out of the parking
lot with them. Calvin, by looking to buy illegal guns had become exactly what
he had always wanted to be, and that was someone who traded in illegal guns.
But the downside was he never got a chance to sell them. Yet when the FBI got
involved in asking him about his activities, Calvin told them he was more
afraid of his underworld contacts than he was of the law. In a scene right out
of the movies, Calvin stood his ground against
ratting out his sources, and when they offered him a deal to walk away with
probation, Calvin, in his one moment of gun running glory, clammed up on them.

Calvin’s public defender lawyer freaked. The government at
that point had no reason to make any deal with Calvin and they didn’t. His
eleventh hour after sentencing recantations fell on deaf ears. He had been out
on bail, telling people the Mafia would kill him if he said anything, and that
was all the law heard when it came right down to it. Calvin had finally gained
the notoriety that he had always wanted. But the sentence was ten years plus.

Calvin served seven years in a federal prison for living
fiction. I had moved away from that part of the world when he got out, but
someone called me to tell me Calvin had returned to Valdosta. He got a job at a
lawn care service but was still as depressing as before, but with a reason this
time around. Calvin stopped talking about being a smuggler but the stories he
told about prison…

As happy as I may be that someone found my wallet, looked at
my driver’s license, found my name and address, called information, and tracked
me down to tell me he had found it, I still had to kill my credit cards. He
turned them into Customer Service at a store, and they had my wallet for over
thirty minutes. My faith in human beings is restored somewhat, but at the same
time, there is just no way to knowing what happened in that thirty minutes. I do know now I can go from standing in my
living room to Valdosta Georgia in less than thirty minutes.

To say I hurried a bit is like saying Custer had a bit of
an Indian problem. I knew if I could get there quick I could have the cards
dead and any damage undone before something weird happened. The woman at the
counter seemed indifferent to the situation, but there have been more customers
who have been ripped off by cashiers than hackers, I would think. A friend of
mine had a cashier steal his credit card number to pay her light bill. You
would think that would be enough information to have her arrested but the
bottom line is they could prove she stole the number or that she paid the bill.
She did get fired, however. Whee.

I had three cards, two credit cards and one ATM card, and
believe it or not, it took the entire drive home to kill off all three. The
Master Card, which was the first to die, took a while because you’ve got to go
through all the press one if your blood type is B negative, press two if you
are now ready to come to our headquarters with an Uzi and finger cramp, press
three for Lithuanian language background music with screaming dwarves. When you
finally get the menu to cancel the card, you do get someone you can speak with reasonably,
or at least I did. It blew him away someone turned in my wallet and refused to
take the money as a reward. Honestly, that happens more often than not in South
Georgia. No matter what else you may think of this place the people here are
mostly very honest. Most of us grew up poor here, and stealing is something
that really hurts other people. I’m not saying we’re all this way, but enough
of us are to make a difference in the world we live in. It’s the world we
choose to live in.

The Discover Card was easier by far to kill off and the
woman walked me through my last transactions, as did the Master Card guy, but I
had to ask him to do it. I told them what I had bought, when I had bought it,
and everything else wasn’t legit. Neither card had been used in the last hour.
The Discover people had the best security by far. I had to answer some
questions about my past that wouldn’t have shown up on a statement, and they wanted
to know what I had set up on automatic payments and they wanted to know
security questions and stuff like that.

My local bank’s ATM card wasn’t that much of a hassle but
at the same time, their jump through hoops pressing numbers got on my damn nerves.
There should be a kill switch on these things, and fortunately, Discover has an
answer to that problem. For a small monthly fee they’ll kill your cards for
you, all of them, all at once, if you lose your wallet. They also are sly enough
to offer this to people who have just killed their cards. In the thirty minutes I had lost control of
my two credit cards and ATM card, nothing at all had happened to me. In the
following thirty minutes, I had to go through all sorts of weirdness just to
make sure nothing else would happen to me.

And yes, I do realize I am exceedingly fortunate.

There are a half dozen or so services I use that go on my
cards automatically. I nearly never
carry cash at all. I haven’t written a check in years. Most of the things I buy are charged to my
Master Card because it’s associated with an airline, and I get one bill a month
for everything I buy. It comes directly
out of my checking account. Now all of that is gone for a few days and I have
more cash money on me right now than I have had in quite some time. I bought
groceries with cash. I’m going to have to buy gasoline with cash, and that’s
going to suck. I’ll have to go in to pay for it now. I can’t remember the last time I paid cash
for gas, really, I can’t.

This is a reality check, no pun intended, as to how much
I rely on those cards to survive. Just a simple trip into town to get cash was
an experience. To their credit, no pun intended, my local bank reacted with
great alacrity when I told them I needed cash because my card had been
compromised. I told them I had already killed the card via phone but they
checked anyway. The woman’s reaction to the two words “lost card” was pretty
impressive. She was reaching for the phone before I could explain what had
happened.

I was one of the last people in America to get a credit
card. I was also one of the last people in America to put everything on it, and
go cashless. Now, with money in my pocket, I feel ill at ease. There isn’t a
plan B here. If I run out of money I’m just screwed now. I have to wait until
the bank opens up Monday to get more money or I have to use a check. It’s
really a very odd feeling, but I do remember when this was how I once lived.

Thursday, March 29, 2012

Trayvon Martin weighed one hundred and forty pounds. George
Zimmerman weighs two hundred and fifty
pounds. Zimmerman claims Martin attacked him so he was forced to defend himself
with a gun. This will go down in manhood history as the “I’m a pussy” defense.

Wednesday, March 28, 2012

At one I wake up and look at the clock to discover it’s one. One is a damnable time to be awake when I
want to be asleep, but then again, is there ever a time anyone has wanted sleep
and that time not been damnable? Sleep escapes me. It flees from me like a first
date who just discovered the man her best friend set her up with thinks dental
hygiene is a tool of Satan. It flees from me like a little kid who has just
tossed a baseball through the bedroom window while mom and dad were planning
more kids. Sleep flees from me as if it were some drug were I to take too much,
I might be cured of weird analogies.

The drugs are there but I do not take them. At one the
very best I can hope for is to get another three hours, nearly four maybe, and
I cannot go to work stoned. It’s a never ending cycle for some people; drugs to
help them sleep and drugs to keep them awake because they take drugs to make
them sleep. I have a meeting at ten, which is nine hours away, and I wonder
what I’ll be like when the people I am meeting with show up. The disconnect button
was left on earlier in the day and I fear the correlation I am now forming in
my brain in regard to that button.

I went to the grocery store and it seemed like I was
always in someone’s way, or they were in my way, and if I stopped someone else
stopped behind me, peering over my shoulder, looking past me as if I had just
blocked vital food supplies, or someone stopped in front of me, and they were blocking
vital food supplies. I was disconnected
from the hive mind, that thing someone and I were talking about Saturday over
tea.

The theory is that people in the city or people in
general when they’re thrown together in a public place, will subconsciously
develop a set of rules for traveling past one another, and around one another.
This theory does not, I repeat does not, apply to people in cars in traffic.
See! The cars give people a sense of disconnect so it doesn’t work in traffic. I
have that sort of shell around me sometimes, and I think people realize it. The
disconnect button gets pushed and suddenly some eighty year old woman cuts me
off at the cashier with a snarl. She’s pumped on Geritol and got a fresh set of
Depends on. She’s got her AARP card out
and this woman is getting a discount on something, now, dammit.

This makes sense, you know. No, not about the Geritol but
that too might be true. Some of us do not play well with others and it’s not
like people drift back and forth in between the two groups. Maybe some camouflage
better than others do, but in the grocery store I feel my grip on sanity begin
to fade as people keep getting in my way, or I in their way. Could the theory be
working, and one part of the theory is some of us simply do not get it? Could
there be people who cannot slip into the V of the flock? You’ve seen those schools
of fish where they all turn at the same time? This works because larger fish
can’t single any one of them out, and if there is a disconnected fish, that is
the one who gets eaten by the mackerel. That’s what’s going on in the middle of
the grocery store; these people want me to be mackerel bait for the betterment
of the species. The herd animals leave me to stare off into space as the lions
are watching and waiting for some genetic anomaly to kick in and leave some cat
food on the plains of the Serengeti.

It’s two by the time I finish that last sentence and I
wonder why I bother to go to bed at all. The dogs couldn’t live with a normal
person, I am certain of that. I wonder if they wonder if their human isn’t in
some way damaged, or deranged. I don’t yell at them or hit them, but I wonder
if they can feel that disconnect that I have with people, and I wonder if they attend
to me so because they realize they are my only hope for a family of my own.

That, too, is part of it. I never wanted a human family
of my own the way some people do. I knew a woman who lay on the ground and
cried like a child when her pregnancy test was negative. She wanted a child so
badly I think she would have stolen one if she and her husband had not finally
conceived. I’ve never gotten that either, never had the urge to procreate, and
I have never understood those people who have.

At three I give up on sleep, and I give up on this. I’ll
finish it much later, but now I’m going to feed the mutts and get ready for
what promises to be a very long day. The
coffee pot’s automatic timer kicks in and Lucas wants out. They are trained to
get up when the timer goes off even if they’ve been up with me for hours. I
have to wonder how much like me they are when they do this, and I’m running on
autopilot, certainly, but to what degree?

Almost nineteen hours after it begun, this comes to a
close. What is this? Why is it? How many other people write disconnected essays
late at night and wonder why they cannot sleep? Why am I not falling down to
rest instead of trying to make the last part of this, whatever it is, make some
sort of sense? Is that what I get instead of sleep, free passage in Aisle Three,
and 2.7 kids? I feel very disconnected
right now from everything human, except for this.

Monday, March 26, 2012

Before Joan of Arc was burned at the stake one of the
charges against her was she had worn men’s clothes in public. This is just a
very severe case of social contract getting out of hand but think about
it…where you work, or shop, if a man showed up wearing a dress and facial
make-up then it would be a little weird. The actual value of a man wearing a
dress isn’t at all different than a woman wearing a dress, but how we react to
social aberration defines what people can or cannot do without some sort of negative
response on our part. ( Yeah, I’m ignoring the heresy thing, but haven’t I said
enough on that already? )

Cell phones piss me off. I won’t use one when I’m talking to
a cashier or wait staff, and I won’t use one when I’m driving in traffic. There
isn’t a law against using a cell when in line at the grocery store, but I think
it’s rude to carry on a conversation on the phone when dealing with live
people. So even though I think it is okay to talk on the open road and that is
illegal, I don’t think talking while interacting with a cashier is okay,
however it is legal.

Perfume pisses me off. If someone outside of your personal
space can smell you then you are wearing too much. If someone outside your area
code can smell your perfume then it’s time to stop buying the gallon jug of
kerosene mixed with chemical scent sold by a celebrity who wouldn’t be caught
dead in the places it is sold. But this doesn’t make it illegal, mind you, just
irritating to me.

Moreover, my sense of social and moral outrage depends a lot
on my mood. On those days things are going well and I’m happy I am less outraged
by the social injustice of improper cell phone usage and perfume wearers. On
those days things are going poorly these things piss me off. I give you Monday,
March 26, 2012 and a few observations of a day.

If I bring my lunch there is a higher risk that someone at
work will want to socialize with me and I won’t be able to write during lunch.
If I go to a sit down restaurant and eat I won’t have enough time to write
during lunch. I can get fast food but I hate that stuff. There is a sub shop
that is less than wretched, it is close, and they have good service. I can get
in and out of there, eat my lunch, and still get two hundred words down, and
maybe more.

Now, I am all for getting what you pay for and getting what
you want. Yet here we go. A young woman on a cell phone is in front of me. She
is wearing too much perfume. And she is holding a piece of paper. If you want a
quick lunch do not get behind someone ordering for other people. Worse than any
of this the woman is downright rude to the man trying to make her multiple
orders. She wants a very exact amount of all things on each of her orders.
“Naw, naw, that’s too much” or “more than that, Boy” and with each of her
demands, in between the conversation she’s having on her cell phone, she raps
on the glass partition angrily. She wants mayonnaise not on the sandwiches but
in little plastic containers on the side. And then the person she’s talking to
changes an order and doesn’t want tomatoes. She wants one sandwich with the
bread toasted, but nothing on it, and the stuff that would be inside wrapped up
in plastic, and the mayonnaise and mustard in little plastic containers, so she
can make the sandwich for breakfast tomorrow. All the while she’s rapping on
the glass partition and treating this guy like he’s a moron for not
understanding the multiple orders. I’ve dealt with him before and he’s
competent and friendly but she’s pushing him the wrong way. She pushing me the
wrong way, as well as the customers behind me, who are all beginning to see her
as someone who is killing off their lunch hours, too. I take my gum out of my
mouth because it now tastes like her perfume, and I drop it into her purse
while she’s demanding the guy cut each sandwich into four pieces and wrap them
all up individually. There are two guys in suits who are now beginning to
exhale loudly and fidget. The guy making my sandwich, knowing I have exact
change, helps me leapfrog her in the line and the other guy takes a credit card
from the suits and also bypasses the woman. It gets more interesting when the
woman tries to pay with a food stamp card and has to call to get the PIN.

She begins the conversation for the PIN with “Who dis? Who
dis? Go get Tilly, go tell Till come to the phone now!” and I sit down in a
booth just to ride this one down to the ground. I have to see how this plays
out. This woman has come to this restaurant with complex and confusing orders,
demanded extra everything, made the help here jump through hoops, and now she
can’t pay for the order, which she is trying to pay for with a food stamp card.
No one says anything to her, but if looks and body language could kill…

I watched as the woman had to scrape up enough money to pay
for her order and argue loudly with whoever it was she was speaking to on the
phone. I cuss like a drunken sailor, in private, but this woman is just plain
foul mouthed. She then took the argument into the parking lot where she stood
beside her car with the door open, effectively blocking the parking spot next
to her as well as the one where she had parked.

So here are a few questions; what if anything, has this
woman done wrong, and on the outrage scale, how bad is it? Another question is
this one; the two guys in suits, the three guys who work behind the counter and
the woman are all the key players in this. Did you ascribe any race to any of
these people given the information I gave you? Do you think the irritation in
the scene you could feel would be higher or lower, depending on race? Did you
at anytime feel like I was making some sort of racial statement before you got
to this question?

Generally speaking, the more disenfranchised a person feels
in society the less likely that person is to feel obligated to operate within
the social contract. Remember the old jokes about women drivers? What very few
people realize is those jokes were predominately about white women drivers
because back when that joke began to emerge, there were very few black women
drivers, and their race was a much bigger problem than their gender. Is that a
true statement? Is it still true today?

I have no idea what it is like anywhere else, but Southern
language skills are terrible. I cannot imagine if the two men in suits were
looking for an employee, if they would have considered the woman as a prospect,
if for no other reason, she sounded as if she was fired from the Snuffy Smith comic
strip for not knowing English. It’s an incredible piece of irony that Georgia
would make a law mandating English as the official language of the state and
its school system fails so utterly to teach it, and its citizens have a disdain
for the language as a rule.

Joan of Arc demanded a change in the way things were,
created a change, and was invited to a bonfire for her troubles. The Sub woman,
of unknown social and racial origins, demanded petty things from a sandwich
shop, and here we are now, trying to connect the dots. Do we create an
underclass of people who feel so disconnected from the norm they just do not
see the inconvenience they cause other people, or is it they are all just selfish
parasites who have a sense of entitlement? How do you feel about putting this
woman somewhere between those two extremes? Where would you put her? I suspect
that people like Joan of Arc rise in history because people do not question the
ways things are. One day, things are the way they will be until someone changes
them.

Sunday, March 25, 2012

It’s like being a leaf on a tree, or in a hot air balloon,
or maybe it’s like being dead. I don’t think being dead is like anything at all
and the idea of ghosts or spirits is an idea worn totally out like a wheel
spinning forever and going nowhere at all. But I see the small campfire, and I
see the men, and I see the earth below me, and I sink into the scene as if it
were a movie that my mind has made for me to play a part in. I’m an extra here.
I have no speaking parts. I don’t move in front of the camera to take orders or
run in panting to deliver some message from the battle.

I lay against the shattered remains of a chimney and I do
not care about the soot. I can feel the grime on my face from a hundred days of
war with no time off for civilization. No clean clothes, no real food, no sort
of sanitary conditions in any regard for nearly four months. Some of the men
talk about how the fleas and mosquitoes and the lice start to give up on a man
after a couple of weeks without bathing. There is no chance to take a dip in
any of the creeks we come to because twenty thousand men make a mess of
everything when they descend upon a valley or take up in a forest. We eat
everything that is alive or that was.Men from the woods know what can be eaten and whole plants are pulled up
by the roots. Bird nests are robbed of their eggs or their fledglings. I saw a
man eat a sparrow raw, with just its head pulled off and the feathers
plucked.We have scorched the earth of
all living creatures to feed ourselves and our waste piles up as monuments to
the glory we once sought. We are a monster making our way towards another
monster to fight for the rights of Hell.

It’s odd the detail, the things I see here that a movie
couldn’t show. There are men here who have never worn shoes or boots before.
They wouldn’t own a pair if they were given the choice because bare feet are
better footing than boots. The soles of their feet are thick and leathery. They
make fun of those of us who desperately need footwear and these are the same
men who are nearly immune to the cold. They live in the open much better than
the rest of us, and they are better shots with their rifles, too. These men
carry weapons that are patched together from a war seventy years long dead,
when their forefathers fought not for the nation but to save themselves from
war. Pick the winning side and make sure the winning side wins, is the old joke
they tell but now it is wearing thin. These are men who have begun to reach
their limit in this war. Some have melted away already, never to be seen again.
There is no real effort to catch deserters now, and there are too many of them
anyway. Men don the bloody uniforms of
the recently killed and limp South to get away. The story of three brothers who
pretended to be blind, with one who was faking being half blind, is told again
and again. These stories are spoken in hushed voices lest an officer wander up
at the wrong moment, or a stray Sergeant who might be fraught enough to try to
instill discipline on a dying army could arrive. These are men who have run out
of miracles and almost out of bullets.

There is a raid and some volunteer so they can slip
towards the north in the dark without being seen. Surrender alone and they
might feed you. You might pass for a Union soldier if you play mute. They might
pass you by and you can make a new life there, where towns aren’t burned and
fields aren’t blasted.You could find
the widow of a dead man who needs a field hand and you could start all over
again. One man out of ten on this raid slips away in the dark. Half will return
to camp and claim they got lost. The truth is known; they just lost their nerve
to go on, or get away. The other half will try to escape in the dark, and if
they are found they know they’ll be shot by either side, but they have to try
something. Men try to hide in holes like animals but after four months of
fighting they smell worse than death. They’re found out and they die in the
holes, like animals, but at least they get buried.

There’s a joke that has been going around since ’62 that
the wild pigs that follow us taste better than those that follow the enemy. They’re
wily animals, staying well far enough away so they don’t get shot at or eaten,
but near enough to close in after the battle. “Pig Stickers” is what some men
call their knives because it is the last weapon you’ll have to keep them off of
you if you’re wounded.At Sawmill Hill
they put the wounded in a cave to keep them safe and the back part of the cave
was filled with pigs hiding from the war. The battle pushed the line past the
cave twice, but when they went to get the wounded all was left was the eye
glasses and teeth and some bones.Some
of the men think the pig stories are lies made up to keep men from crawling off
to die, but I don’t think dying men would get lied to like that.

Sometimes you’re where you are because that is where you
wound up. Say what you want but every man getting ready to go on the raid knows
it’s an act of desperation and each one knows the war is already lost. Each one
keeps fighting for his own reason, and maybe for no reason other than this is
where he is. You might argue with that and you might be right. But this is
where I am, and I cannot leave. I can’t help but wonder how many of us are like
this.

Saturday, March 24, 2012

Time stopped. I remembered being back at home and waiting
for the war to start. I remembered how it felt when I heard the horses coming,
and I knew they were coming for me. I wanted to go so badly. I was the oldest,
nearly fifteen, so it was my place to go. It was my duty to go. Pa didn’t want
it, and Ma threw a fit, but this was what I was supposed to do. This is what
had to be done. Rickfield was leading a group up to Virginia and he, the old
man himself, came for me. I would even get a uniform, and maybe a new rifle.

The first battle went hard at first, then Jackson led us
forward and it seemed like the war as over already. A man could walk around the
field and pick up any rifle he wanted. There were new boots on some of the
yellers that gave up. We didn’t think about robbing the dead, but later on we
did just to survive. That first battle, that first day, if only we had lost; I
wish I had died in battle that first day, thinking we had won, and there was
nothing to stop us from marching right into Washington, if we wanted to.

They never stopped coming. No matter how well we did
against them there was always more. They always was well fed and they always
had bullets and boots. We’d pick over their dead and there would be pocket
watches and crosses around their necks. The uniforms were new and clean. We
were dressed in rags and dead men’s boots. Every year it got worse and worse.
When Vicksburg fell we knew we had been cut in half. Then it got to where a man
couldn’t talk to another about what was heard about the war. But we didn’t have
to hear to know. All we had to do is look at who was living and who was dying.

We went on a raid and marauded a wagon train. There was
more food there than we had seen in months. There were blankets and powder and
there was medical supplies as if the war was just starting for them. Their mules was better fed than our officers. We
stuffed bread into our mouths as we herded the train back to our lines, but I
knew then we had lost the war. You could see it in the eyes of the men who
scrambled around trying to get to the hard tack and bacon. This train had
gotten took because the Yankees weren’t scared of bringing things in close to
us now. They could lose this much and it was nothing to them, and it was
everything to us. They even had jars of pickles in their train and all manner
of food we thought had been quit made. It was like watching buzzards the day
after a battle in the Summer the way we went after that food. The officers
tried to get us off of it but what are you going to do with a thousand starving
men when there’s only enough food for five hundred? Men ran off the line when
they heard the word “food” and when the attack came there was a mob of us not
an army.

I saw it, in the end, and I wasn’t surprised at all. They
let the train get taken from them. They knew how bad off we were, and they knew
when them groceries hit the line no man would stand to post. They had followed the train back in and now
they poured cannon fire into where their own wagons stood with our men swarming
over them. They hit the lines in a dozen
places at once and we held them in ten. Even as caught as we were, as starved
as we were, as weak as we were, it almost didn’t work. They had to come in fast
and light, and very nearly, we held. But there is no nearly in holding. You
either win or you lose, and I got back to the line and watched them charge a
hundred yards away, at the left flank, and I saw our men running again. Some
knew it was far too late to do anything about it. Atlanta lay behind us and if
we ran we would be fighting in Georgia next. But there were so many of them,
and the shells were landing all around us. I picked up my rifle and ran.

Running gets easier. The first time is hard and you know
you’ve left men to die, but you go anyway. You fight the next battle saying you
won’t run again, but you do. You get to know other men who run, and you stay
close to them so you can have somebody to run with. You’ll stop running
sometimes long enough to fire once, maybe twice, to keep them from following
close, but sometimes a man will stop running, to die fighting, and he will.

The sound of cannons was where we ran to, knowing if we
made it close enough they wouldn’t chase us into that, but we didn’t make it.
There was more and more and more of them. We got to the edge of the woods to
see them taking the guns out on the hills. They had come in hard and with more
than we could have thought possible. The
first bullet damn near took Willis’ head off. I ran back into the woods, but I
knew it was over.

They was using us for target practice.There was four of us, then three, then Calvin
and me left. We got down in a shell hole and they stood back and laughed as
they shot at us. They took turns, yelling and hollering when they got close, or
one of us got hit, and I could feel the bullets hitting close as I hugged the
ground. Calvin got hit and he jumped. They peppered him good for it, and I pulled
his body over closer to where I was, and I wondered how much longer it would
take. They opened up good then, and I wondered if they were trying to cut him
to pieces to get to me, and I could hear the bullets hitting Calvin, and then
one tore through him, and then another.

Time began again and I could smell nothing but blood and
fear in the hole, if it could be called that. I stuck my head up to get a quick
look and there was a dozen or so of them standing looking back at me, but none
of them were shooting. I started to stand up, to try to surrender, then one of
the dozen or so guys did this odd little dance, swaying back and forth with his
arms. I couldn’t figure it out, and they all broke out laughing. I heard a twig
snap and realized it was a ploy, but I couldn’t get turned around quick enough.
The bayonet caught me in the right side and I screamed. I felt in all the way
inside of me, more of me than I thought there ever was, and I was louder than I
thought I could be.Time slowed down
again, to a crawl, and I heard them knifing and sticking other hold outs and
runners as I bled out, and died.

Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Trayvon Martin was shot and killed by George Zimmerman.
Martin was unarmed when he was killed. Zimmerman followed Martin for an undetermined
amount of time before the shooting, this after being told by the police not to
do so. These are the facts in the case and no one is saying these facts are in
dispute.

I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that one when
one human being shots another human being in public with these facts undisputed
there is going to be an arrest 99.99% of the time. You simply cannot follow
someone around and then shoot them and expect to be treated as an innocent
victim, yet here we are.

Let’s take race out of this totally. Let’s say that race
doesn’t exist at all. Let’s give Zimmerman the benefit of the doubt and assume
Martin’s race was irrelevant. So what the
police are saying is that anyone could be shot by anyone else, with equal
liberty, justice, and freedom and not be arrested in those exact circumstances?

This is the precedent law enforcement wants to set?
Because if it is the gutters will flow with blood because anyone can shoot
anyone for no reason at all, other than they have decided the other person is a
threat. They can follow a human being, hunt that person, and kill that person,
even after the police tell them not to, is that where we’re going with this?

But let’s not give Zimmerman the benefit of the doubt.
Let’s go with the crime and see what happened and why. How big a part did
Martin’s race play in this? How much did his age play into this? What about his
gender? Young, black and male are the three crimes that Martin seemed to have
committed in the eyes of George Zimmerman. He followed Martin and then he
killed him.

The Florida “stand your ground” law allows for a person
to defend themselves against anyone else who might be threatening that person.
So, if you think someone is a threat you follow that person? Hmmm, there goes
someone who might be a threat to me, the cops have told me not to follow that
person I feel threatened by so I’ll follow that person and shoot that person.

Is this how we, as a society, will define self-defense?

But once again, let’s take all defining characters away
from Martin and dress him up nice. Let’s say he was a ten year old white girl.
Or a seventy year old Asian man. Or a red headed woman who was dressed in a
hoodie yet was unarmed when she was shot dead.

Young. Black. Male.

Martine went three for three in the looks like your life isn’t
worth as much to the cops as other people do list.

At a minimum, Zimmerman should answer in court for this.
He should have to explain why he killed someone else. Is that too hard to
understand? Let’s hear his side of the story, in public, in a courtroom, and
let Zimmerman be judged by a jury of his peers.

George Zimmerman denied that basic right to Trayvon
Martin no matter how this case is looked at or by whom. Now, it should be, will
be, demanded, that Zimmerman answer for what he did. If he defended himself
against a threat, let him go into a courtroom and say so.

It is wrong for law enforcement not to arrest someone who
just killed another person, in public, after being told to stand down.

This is wrong, people, it is wrong for one man to play
cop, play jury, play judge, play executioner and then play the victim.

It is wrong, very wrong, for anyone to remain silent now.
For when the life of someone is taken unjustly then we are all threatened. If
Young, Black and Male is enough to get you killed then how long before that list
expands, like it did when Hitler rose to power?

If you think this an exaggeration then speak to the
parents of Trayvon Martin and let them tell you how it feels to live in a
country where their child was murdered and nothing was done.

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The Non Disclaimer

My writing reflects the things I see, think, and experience, and those things in my past that have led me to be me. It is not always pretty, it is not always funny, and no one has ever made mention of my life as a Disney Movie. If sex, drugs, profanity, or a general irreverence for all things religious somehow offends you, well, there are other blogs which will satisfy your need for self assurance.